It's so warm here and I can't figure out why I am happy when everything else is wrong. I guess this has been the best year of my life in many respects. I'm struggling to convince myself that happiness is possible. However, as happy as I am whenever my parents talk to me I feel like crying and punching them... way irritable. And I don't know why, why the way I feel should be so drastically different when I'm with them than with everyone else. This is my last year and a half with them. I don't want to make it miserable for all of us...

We are all so sick of school... can't handle anymore... the only answer is to work harder. Shove calculus and analytical solutions in through my eyelids, read Steinbeck until my brain shuts down from exhaustion. I have a mental battle every day trying to force myself to read the history chapter, do my chem homework, pay attention. I want to just sit back and read The Bell Jar for the third time, which makes me feel so acquainted with madness or slipping from the world. I want to be absorbed into the books I read, where I care about the world and the characters. I wake up every morning and my life becomes tautology... over and over again, the redundancy of mondays, the endless stretching of weeks until spring break in the far future. One foot in front of the other, I'll say, keep moving.

I turned in poems for our annual school literary magazines. I always feel a bit weird sharing poetry with the school; it's like taking some rotted piece of me and squelching it around to everyone. Poetry, unless factitious, can only expose a vital part of the author. I don't want the school to see me.
So I pick my least personal poetry, poetry more about others than about myself. I pick poetry that I want them to read, some veiled responses that I could never deliver to my friends. I remain icognito.

On the subject of poetry here is some Stephen Crane poetry I like:
Iwas in the darkness;
I could not see my words
Nor ther wishes of my heart.
Then suddenly there was a great light--

"Let me into the darkness again."
-----------
The Wayfarer
The wayfarer,
perceiving the pathway to truth,
was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
"Ha," he said,
"I see that none has passed here
in a long time."
Later he saw that each weed
was a singular knife.
"Well," he mumbled at last,
"Doubtless there are other roads."